Three Revenue Case Studies

Posted on May 6, 2006 at 10:24 pm

Coming on the heels of our post about Markus Frind’s postcast, here’s a look at how successful he really has been. Let’s break down the figures for you and find two more examples for comparison!

Case Study #1 - Markus Frind
The first exposure I found on Markus’s revenue numbers were on Robert Scoble’s blog. That was on March 4, 2006. Let’s use his base number of $10,000 a day.

  • $10,000 per day
  • $30,000 $300,000 per month
  • $3.65 million per year
  • 1 Employee

Case Study #2 - Steve Pavlina
Steve Pavlina recently posted a strong instructional article on his revenue generation efforts. His story is also a solo effort and has really been able to build up his brand in the blogosphere. On May 3rd, Steve revealed that his site was bringing in over $200 a day.

  • $200 per day
  • $6,000 per month
  • $72,000 million per year
  • 1 Employee

Obviously, Steve is far away from Markus’s figures, but $72,000 is no laughing joke and certainly considered a good annual salary for most jobs.

Case Study #3 - Jason Calacanis & Weblogs Inc.
Let’s take the time machine back to June 19th, 2005 before Jason Calacanis sold Weblogs Inc. to AOL for $25 million. Jason wrote a detailed post about his blog network’s daily revenue figures. Let’s take a look at those figures that day.

  • $2,335 per day
  • $70,050 per month
  • $852,275 million per year
  • 103 Employees Freelancers, 6 Full-time Employees (see Jason’s comment below)

Note: By its sale date 4 months later, Jason boasted an annual revenue explosion at $2 Million; though the figure was still below PlentyOfFish.com.

Weblogs Inc. started off around the same time as PlentyOfFish.com. I wondered how much could be possible with 103 Markus Frinds. The Weblogs Inc. numbers look successful but considering the magnitude of human capital being used, the margins don’t look spectacular anymore. Even if Weblogs Inc. has matched Markus’s one site revenue, it’s still not a comparable success based on this factor! It’s been 7 months since the sale. Will Jason be allowed by AOL to update us with a more recent revenue figure?

Filed under: Online Revenue 
5 Comments
  1. Jason Says:
    May 7th, 2006 at 12:51 pm

    Two errors:

    1. That number was just Google Adsense, and Google Adsense was a small % of revenue.

    2. We had 103 *freelancers* at the time. We had maybe 6 f/t folks.
  2. 1Offs Says:
    May 7th, 2006 at 5:25 pm

    Thanks for dropping by Jason!

    1. If that’s the case, wouldn’t 25 Million be a real bargin for AOL? Markus said he wouldn’t sell PlentyOfFish for $20+ Million, since that’s only 7 years of revenue figures, almost all profit.

    2. Did the freelancers not partake in the revenue? I was under the impression that they did.

    3. Any chance of a new revenue update in the new future?
  3. Jason Says:
    May 7th, 2006 at 6:03 pm

    Can’t get into details… that whole SEC/public company thingy. :-)

    However, next time I do a startup I’m thinking about just posting my QuickBooks file to the web.
  4. singingspaniel Says:
    May 9th, 2006 at 3:36 am

    $10,000 per day -> $300,000 per month not $30,000. It’s still a lot of cash, but the missing zero there makes quite a difference.

    Great blog by the way, I’ll be watching it.
  5. 1Offs Says:
    May 9th, 2006 at 8:59 pm

    Yikes, what a blunder! Thanks or letting me know! I’m striking the figure out but keeping it visible as a reminder never to do this again.. haha
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